Medellin Cartel

The organisation that made cocaine an industry and then tried to make a country ungovernable. The Medellin cartel formed around 1976 as a cooperative arrangement among Colombian traffickers, above all Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa brothers, who pooled shipments, refining and routes to move Peruvian and Bolivian coca paste through Colombia to the United States. Its innovation was logistical and financial: aircraft, submarines and shared cargo risk, on a scale that at its peak may have supplied the great majority of cocaine entering the United States and generated billions of dollars a year. Escobar spent some of it on housing and football pitches in Medellin, which bought him genuine local support, and was briefly elected to the Colombian congress. The turn to terrorism came over extradition to the United States, which the cartel fought under the slogan of preferring a grave in Colombia to a cell in the north. It assassinated a justice minister, an attorney general, newspaper editors and a leading presidential candidate, bombed an airliner in flight killing 107 people, and detonated a truck bomb at the security police headquarters in Bogota. Escobar negotiated imprisonment in a prison he built himself and walked out of it in 1992. He was tracked down and killed on a Medellin rooftop in December 1993. The cartel fragmented and the Cali organisation took over the trade. Medellin is now a substantially safer city than it was. The cartel operated from around 1976 to 1993. Medellin is Colombia's second city, with around 2.6 million people. Escobar was 44 when he was killed. Colombia's murder rate peaked around 1991 at one of the highest ever recorded. The country signed a peace agreement with its largest guerrilla group in 2016.

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